Since arriving at MAX in 1988 I have offered courses in modern European and South Asian history. Many of these reflect my scholarly interest in colonialism and its impact on both colonizer and colonized. Among the topics courses I offer are advanced seminars on Gandhi and the imperial idea, a first-year seminar on the British Empire through Film and a course on Britain and the slave trade. Recently I developed two new courses: “Hitler, Stalin and the Beatles: Europe Since 1945 through Film” and “The Bible and Empire.” Over the years I have also offered survey courses on the British Empire, modern Britain, modern Europe and ancient India and modern India and Pakistan. Every few years I also welcome the chance to challenge our History Major seniors in thinking about the diverse nature of historical investigation in the Department’s Senior Seminar.
The intellectual encounters produced by modern European imperialism have dominated my research agenda these past two decades. My first book examines John Stuart Mill’s career in the London offices of the East India Company. It traces parallels between his views about administering India and his famous intellectual development. I develop this idea further in a follow-up essay, contributed to a volume on Mill and India that I also co-edited. Here I argue that the submerged voices of Indians can be found in the imperial discourse that influenced Mill’s thinking on education, public opinion, and the role of women.
Indian education is the topic of my third book, a collection of documents relating to the debate among British administrators whether to support classical Indian education or one based on western knowledge and the English language. This volume brings together thirty documents, including some never before published. One of these is a draft memo by J. S. Mill criticizing T. B. Macaulay’s argument for restricting government funding to English-language education only. My co-editor—Martin Moir—and I challenge the idea that educational policy was solely an invention of colonial administrators by uncovering the significant contributions of Indians to this famous debate.
My fourth book project was Rammohun Roy’s visit to England in the early 1830s. Famous to South Asians as a social and religious reformer, and early nationalist, Rammohun was also a celebrity in Britain and the American republic by the 1820s. My book examines the reasons for his fame, using these to trace key developments in religion, political reform, and early feminism among contemporary Britons. Rammohun’s celebrity, I argue, is a mirror in which the making of modern Britain is reflected. My book also explores how Rammohun sought to provincialize England by criticizing its slow progress towards rational religion and by praising republican nations such as the United States.
I have also published articles on topics such as J. S. Mill and the Irish question; J.S. Mill and Indian administration; peasant desertions in western India during the transition from Maratha to British rule; J. S. Mill and Indian education; the role of sexual intimacy in the creation of colonial knowledge; and the linked efforts by Rammohun Roy and Thomas Jefferson to create a personalized version of the New Testament.
In 2014 I was invited to deliver a keynote address to a political theory conference on the subject of “Colonial Exchanges” that resulted in a published essay exploring the missed opportunity for intellectual exchange between J. S. Mill and Rammohun Roy when the famous Bengali visited London in the 1830s. A 2015 invitation to present a paper on Mountstuart Elphinstone at an 2015 international conference in London celebrating the 200th anniversary of the publication of An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul led to a published essay on Elphinstone and Indian Education. In 2018 I was invited to contribute an essay (on H. H. Wilson and Sanskrit drama) for a Festschrift for Gita Dharampal-Frick and deliver it at her retirement ceremonies at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University. And in 2021 I was invited by the Brahmo Samaj—cofounded by Rammohun Roy in 1828—to deliver a webinar presentation (“Rammohun Roy, Celebrity Unitarian”) as part of their year-long series commemorating the 250th anniversary of Rammohun Roy’s birth: . A Bengali translation of this presentation is slated to appear under the auspices of the Bangla Academy.
I am currently working on two projects. One is an invited essay on Rammohun Roy’s The Precepts of Jesus for The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in India that R. S. Sugirtharajah is editing. The other is a journal article on the impact of German thought—especially the influential ideas of J. G. Herder—on British administrators in India involved in the educational debates of the 1830s.
Books
John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford University Press, 1994)
J. S. Mill’s Encounter with India, co-edited with Douglas Peers and Martin Moir (University of Toronto Press, 1999)
The Great Indian Education Debate, co-edited with Martin Moir (Curzon Press, 1999)
Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010)
Select Scholarly Articles
“Rammohun Roy’s The Precepts of Jesus, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in India, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in preparation)
“Domesticating Sanskrit Drama: H. H. Wilson’s Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus (1826-2827),” in HerStory: Historical Scholarship between South Asia and Europe, Festschrift in Honour of Gita Dharampal-Frick, ed. Rafael Klöber and Manju Ludwig (Heidelberg: CrossAsia, 2018), 139-59
“Intellectual Flows and Counterflows: The Strange Case of J. S. Mill,” in Colonial Exchanges: Political Theory and the Agency of the Colonized, ed. Deborah Baumgold and Burke Hendrix (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 20-42
“‘Notorious and Convicted Mutilators’: Rammohun Roy, Thomas Jefferson, and the Bible,” Journal of World History 20, 3 (2009): 399-434
“Intimacy and Colonial Knowledge,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 3, 2 (2002) – Ejournal
“Defining Christians, Making Britons: Rammohun Roy and the Unitarians,” Victorian Studies 44, 2 (2002): 215-43
“Englische Erziehung und indische Modernität,” trans. David Bruder and Margot Lueck-Zastoupil, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 5-32
